Diana McCaulay

This morning, I’m thinking of my friend, Katy Thacker. Katy was an American – yes, she died – who came to Jamaica in the 1970s fleeing a painful divorce. As she told me the story, she was in court with her soon-to-be ex husband trying to divide their possessions. She started to cry and the judge called a recess. Katy went to the washroom to try to compose herself with the list of possessions in her hand. “The food processor, Diana,” she said. “I realized we were in a war over a Cuisinart.” She said she ripped the list to shreds, went back to the courtroom and told her husband he could have it all. She had survived cancer at a very young age and she knew about priorities.

She went to Jamaica on holiday and fell in love with the island. She was a nurse by training, and she got a job at the Black River hospital – and there she faced the realities of health care in a rural Jamaican hospital. She said she became overwhelmed one day after she had started an IV on a patient, only to have to the IV stand taken away for another, more urgent case, and she became the IV holder, standing beside the patient, with one arm raised. She began managing property in Negril and eventually moved there. Then she learned how to SCUBA dive and started her own small dive operation.

When Katy started to dive, the coral reefs in Negril were healthy and teeming with life. And then she saw them start to die. Along with others she founded the Negril Coral Reef Preservation Society in the early 1990s and that’s how I met Katy Thacker – a small, sunburned, blonde woman who hefted SCUBA tanks as if they were made of Styrofoam. By then she was a Jamaican citizen and everyone in Negril knew her – hoteliers, fishermen, craft sellers, taxi drivers. She took me around Negril to the dangerous beaches where the drugs came in and where there will still the fresh water runnels from the morass carving their channels across the beach, into the morass itself on foot, warming me to look out for crocodiles;and she took me diving to the places where the coral reef was completely covered in algae from improperly treated sewage. Throughout the 1990s she fought for the coral reefs in Negril, she lived in a one room house with her dog and she had the life I thought I wanted.

Then she got sick, cancer again, she left Jamaica, and our contact became irregular. Once I went to see her, she was in remission, living in Davie in Florida, writing, staying alive. I was still working in the private sector then and had the kind of disposable income that would allow me to get on a plane to see a friend, my son was almost through college and I was wrestling with what I wanted to do with my life. Katy lived in a tiny rented cottage on an organic farm and she had chickens for pets. Her eyes were bright but she was emaciated and there was little she could eat – her intestines were in a tangle from the surgeries and from the radiation she had undergone when she was a young woman. She was broke. She walked with me across the farm and let me into the main farmhouse to spend the night. There was a raging thunderstorm and I huddled under slightly doggy blankets in a stranger’s house and imagined being terminally ill, broke and alone. Did I really want Katy’s life after all? We said goodbye the next day at the airport and I knew I would never see her again.

I went to Seattle for graduate school and soon my e-mails to Katy went unanswered. I thought she had died, and I mourned her in Seattle’s misty rain, but Jamaica seemed far away and her loss did not really bite.

And then in the final days of my time in the US, I received an e-mail from her – she was in remission again. And we revived our e-mail correspondence. I went home and she helped me with grant proposals and reviews of Environmental Impact Assessments, and there were times when she was back in hospital but she always came out – until the time she didn’t. Katy Thacker died on Earth Day in 2004. I had never met any member of her family, knew nothing of her life in the US, but she was a shining light to me, an example, a true Jamaican hero I knew would never be acknowledged as such.

If you have read this far, you might be wondering why I am writing about Katy Thacker today. I am thinking of my friend Katy because the newspapers are full of ads and PR pieces about a new housing development in Little Bloody Bay in Negril – renamed Little Bay – the word “bloody” does not, of course, give the right impression. I am thinking of the day Katy took me there by boat, how we pulled the boat up on the sand and sat where the waves turned over, feeling the itch of sandflies, until we went into the water to escape them. “This will be a kept like this, Diana,” she said, “in its natural state. It’ll be a fish sanctuary, the seagrass beds will be kept, and the coastal vegetation, and folks will be able to come and see the way Negril was.” She also told me that she got the funding to manage the Negril Marine Park when she took the Delegate for the European Union to see Little Bloody Bay.

But like all such funding, it came to an end. And Katy died. Little Bloody Bay was “slated for development.” And now the advertisement for Little Bay Country Club, a gated community of 171 residential units, has a fish the size of a sailboat (also pictured) leaping out of the water. There is no natural coastal vegetation in the artist’s impression, it’s all lawns and landscaping with a few coconut trees, because that is our unreal vision of a tropical paradise, there is no jetty for the sailboat, but there will have to be a jetty, so that means dredging, and the beach is wider than it really is, so that probably means “beach nourishment” – read, sand taken from somewhere else. And it will have the right Keep Out signs and state of the art security systems. And it has its approvals from all the regulatory bodies, environmental and otherwise, because not one of them has ever encountered a block of concrete they did not think was of much greater value than a jewel of a cove, with lapping shallow water, and dark green seagrass beds, and seagrape trees trailing their leaves in the water…

Now, anew, I miss my friend Katy… although I am glad she does not know about Little Bay Country Club...